


coalescing into

by bookhobbit



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Autism, Gen, Misgendering, Pre-Canon, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-10-01
Packaged: 2018-04-24 08:28:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4912393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookhobbit/pseuds/bookhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The process by which a child in Yorkshire becomes a magician called Gilbert Norrell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	coalescing into

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really feel able to summarize this well, but essentially it's the trans Norrell fic I've been trying to write for two months. That's it. With some extra added Ravenfeels.
> 
> idk I was in a weird mood writing this and I'm still in a weird mood. I'm sorry for any sadness.

In Yorkshire there is a child who hates her name. It is a symbol of everything that is wrong.

She is not sure if the wrongness is with her or with the world, but she is very definite about the fact that it exists. Her reflection in the mirror never seems quite right - as if something is missing, or something else is there that should not be.

She does not like to look people in the face. She does not like the way her clothes feel against her arms. She especially does not like to sew. It is a reminder of all the wrongness, of how she cannot make herself delicate enough, pretty enough, a good enough little girl, of how she does not want to. Her stitches are never right, never small enough. Her dresses never feel right swishing around her ankles. It never sounds right, being told to be a good little girl. She does not like that either.

“You don’t like anything,” says her governess once, which is wrong. She likes books. She likes them very much. She also likes chocolate, the texture of linen, and rainy days where she can sit in front of the fire.

This child is only just twelve and her parents are dead. She does not know how to grieve the way she is supposed to. She knows they have been expecting tears. She does not seem to have any, or not the right sort.

She has fits, sometimes, of the sort she has had ever since she was a small child. These may or may not involve tears, but do not seem to be the sort that they are expecting.

Mostly she sits in the corner and stares, a little dull and tired, and overall, mostly, she is afraid. Afraid of what will happen to her, afraid of where she will go.

She worries for two months before her uncle writes to her and offers her a place in his house.  Except - he doesn’t write to her, he writes to him. Uncle Haythornthwaite has not seen her since she was in child-skirts, and apparently he is confused.

Or perhaps he’s not. Perhaps he’s quite right.

Well… She wants to go to school. Schools for girls are full of nonsense she has no desire to learn - more sewing, and dancing, and other such things. She wants to learn about history, about natural philosophy. And languages - Greek and Latin of course, and perhaps Hebrew, and all of the old kinds of English in her father’s oldest books, which make her head hurt to try and read.

She has had good governesses, so far - the best her mother could get, although even at the time she had known the sort of protests her father was making. She knows enough Latin to read a little, which she ought not, and she thinks she is beginning to be able to puzzle out Greek writing. But this is as far as it will go, if she stays as she is. If she doesn’t do something.

She blinks a little, and her hands shake, and she tries to think of where she can get real clothes. Proper clothes. The right clothes.

She does not have any money, she will not have any money for a long time, but she can still sew -

It would make her want to laugh, that the symbol of her wrongess is to become her freedom, but she is not a mirthful child. Instead she gathers up her old dresses and linens and locks herself in her room. Someone asks her what she is doing at supper one night and she says, “I am sewing.”

Her governess says, “I suppose you want to be a good little girl. For the memory of your mother.”

She considers this.

“No,” she says, and returns to her room. She can hear murmurs behind her. Odd child. Tomboy. Other things less flattering. They do not matter, she thinks. She will not be here very long.

 _She_ leaves her parents’ house at age twelve and _he_ arrives at his uncle’s a few days later. The change is more a question of caution - supposing he should slip? he ought to get used to it - but it feels more than safe. It feels real.

-

In Yorkshire there is a child and his name is Gilbert. He has decided his name is Gilbert. He had asked his mother the year before: “What would you and Father have called me if I was a boy?”

She had given him an odd startled look and said, “Gilbert, after your grandfather.”

So Gilbert it is. It makes him think of his grandfather, an unpleasant man given to storming around the house and slamming doors. He does not like it. But it is what makes sense.

His uncle greets him gravely and says “Well. Remind me again of your name, young Norrell.”

“Gilbert,” he says, and feels the beat of his heart speed up, because what if he knows - but Haythornthwaite just nods.

“I am not very experienced with raising young men, Gilbert,” he says.

Gilbert blinks a little at _young men_. He is still used to _girl_. He nods uncertainly.

Haythornthwaite continues, “We will have to experiment. Would you like to go to school?”

Gilbert nods vigorously and Haythornthwaite nods back.

It takes more time than that to arrange, of course; the term does not start until fall. In the meantime they settle into a pattern of stiff, uncomfortable politeness. Neither of them quite seem to know what to do with each other. Haythornthwaite is kind to Norrell in a distant sort of way when he presents himself, and Norrell mostly keeps out of his way in return.

Primarily he does this by staying in the library, and it is in the library that he finds The Book. That is how he thinks of it, although of course it is not truly a book. It is a single page, tucked inside another book, one about the history of magic.

Gilbert has been reading a great deal about magic lately. He has some idea that perhaps, somewhere, will be a solution for his - irregularities. He knows that practical magic is no longer done but, like many children of his age, there is still the hope…

Well. It does not matter. The point is that tucked inside a biography on the life of two Argentine magicians is a page of a book that looks much, much older than the one he is holding.

Frowning, he sets the book down on the table and removes the page. It is written in English - though a very old-fashioned sort of English, of the sort that was popular some two or three hundred years ago. It reminds Gilbert of his Shakespeare, a little.

The page is torn at the edges, faded, nearly illegible. But he sets it down and smooths it out.

 _Where the harum-scarum magic of small wild creatures meets the magic of Man, where the language of the wind and the rain and the trees can be understood, there we will find the Raven King,_ he reads, and feels his heartbeat speed up.

The Raven King.

Gilbert remembers being afraid of the Raven King as a child, and of dark places and times, where he lingered. He had kidnapped Christian children, after all, and taken them to live in his kingdoms on the far side of Hell, or so it was said.

But here and now he reads the passages in front of him and they seem to fill him up with something not himself. A desperation - a hunger for wildness and freedom, a desire to learn to speak to the dumb things of the world, which after all were perhaps not dumb but only waiting. A desire to reach out and touch the stormcloud and feel it carry him to other places.

He thinks his heart is full of ravens. But he knows he must learn more.

When he goes to school two months later he packs the page in his sack, sandwiched carefully between two pages of a very dull and worthless-looking book that he does not think anyone will take notice of.

That single page turns into his only saving grace when he is actually there. The work is acceptable. He can do it, perhaps even more easily than the other boys, as he has few other pursuits.

But he is - not well-liked. Gilbert is not so unfamiliar with this sensation, but the idea that one can be beaten for it, and to such a degree, is novel. Not to say that beating is the only recourse the masters and the other boys have for showing their dislike. No. They are quite creative.

He goes home to recover at the end of the term with several new scars and a great deal of bruising, physical and otherwise.

Haythornthwaite summons him a few days later.

“Well,” he says.

Gilbert does not meet his eyes. He continues to pick at the scab on his hand.

“A decision has to be made about whether to send you back to school or not.”

Gilbert nods.

“I don’t think this little experiment has been good for your health,” Haythornthwaite continues. “What do you think?”

Gilbert rocks a little, hating himself for it. “I do not think so either.”

Haythornthwaite nods. “I had hoped you would take over the running of my estate when I go,” he says, not for the first time. “But you do not need to go to school to do that. How do you feel about a private tutor?”

“I had private tutors. Before,” says Gilbert. He looks at the feet of Haythornthwaite’s chair. They are carved into curious little cat-paws. He can see the claws.

“Did you like them?”

“I liked them better than school,” says Gilbert to the chair-feet.

“Well, then.” Haythornthwaite sighs. “I told you before that I have never raised a young man. I am willing to experiment, if you are.”

So Gilbert has tutors for a while. After a few years his uncle sends them away and leaves him to study on his own, because it is evident that he learns better from a book than he does from any person. His relationship with Haythornthwaite continues to on a pattern of removed politeness; the uncertainty has not lifted with time. Sometimes Haythornthwaite talks about Gilbert taking over the estate when he dies, which Gilbert does his best to ignore - he has no intention of taking over anything. He has a goal.

Mostly, though, they ignore each other. This arrangement is perfectly fine with Gilbert.

He gathers books about magic, reads them as fast as he can obtain them, and he saves the page hidden in a box in his room.

-

In Yorkshire there is a boy and he is in love with the Raven King.

When everything feels so wrong he can barely breathe, when the weight of it is pressing down on his chest and stealing all his thoughts, he lies curled up in bed and thinks, when the king comes home it will be better. When the king comes home he will fix me.

He does not know how he wants to be fixed. Whether it is his body or his mind that ought to be changed. He only knows that he cannot keep on like this forever.

At fourteen he has to employ his sewing skills again to deal with the changes in his body. It takes many hours of experimentation and pricked fingers and frustration, and the final product is messy and poorly-stitched. It works, though; it compresses his figure into the shape it ought to have. The tightness against his chest feels soothing and safe, like he thinks hugs are supposed to. But he knows it is only a temporary measure.

He tries his first summoning spells a few months later. They are hesitant, clumsy things, patched together from third and fourth and fifth-hand accounts of magic done a long long time ago. It is no surprise that they do not work, but he still nearly cries anyway.

Nearly. Nearly. The king would want him to be strong.

He spends the next three years researching and gathering as much information as he can. Everything he studies relates back to magic somehow. Late night with hands unsteady from tiredness as he crossreferences this book or that book. Piece together bits of spells. Studying Latin till his eyes ache, so that he can read the Argentines’ work as easily as he could read the newspaper, if he was going to do any such thing.

When he is seventeen, Haythornthwaite dies. It is not a surprise. Gilbert does not cry. He goes to the funeral and stands stiffly while people tell them how sorry they feel for him. He keeps expecting someone to ask why he is in breeches and not a dress, why he is calling himself Gilbert. But no-one knew him well enough as a child to find anything about him surprising.

When it is over he goes home and withdraws to the library, curling up into a chair and rocking slowly.

Gilbert is not sure that he loved his uncle. He is not sure that he did not love his uncle. In truth he is not sure how to conceptualize the answer to the question. He is not sure if he will miss him.

But now he is gone, and his inheritance is here, and he knows exactly what he is going to do with it.

Well over ten years from now, Childermass will come into his life and help mend the cracks, not asking questions or prying, simply slinking around in his shadowy way and changing things and bribing people until he feels safe. Until he is sure, quite sure, that this will never be used against him.

But for now he does his best. His first act is to change all the records in the family Bible. He bribes a judge, so that the Norrell family consists of two children: one living, a boy, and one dead, a girl. She has a name that makes him recoil when he hears it. He is the heir to his uncle’s fortune.

And he is a magician. Gilbert starts collecting books and as his library grows so do his hopes.

But five years of intense research and magic later he is no closer. He is twenty-two and his heart is broken, so he buries it, because it is easier than healing. He does not sit in the orchard surrounded by the scent of pears and the chirping of birds, not any more.

And he has to accept that there is no way of changing himself. That he will be bound to this - to cloistering himself for a week every month until his body stops betraying him, to wearing his vest, to hiding and to fear - for the rest of his life.There are no spells that will do it for him. Not now, not with the Raven King’s magic gone.

But he is going to bring it back. He is going to bring magic back, with or without the Raven King. If making him forgotten is what it takes…

Well, there are greater sacrifices.

In Yorkshire there is a man, and he loves no-one and nothing but his books and his magic. He lives alone, or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that he is alone.

He lives in the house he inherited from his uncle and he cultivates his library with his new fortune. And he waits.

He does not know what he is waiting for. Not yet.


End file.
